A German court has found a Berlin-based Lebanese curator and writer guilty of “approval of crimes” and imposed a €1,000 fine, or about $1,058, over Instagram story posts he shared last year about Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israeli ravers at the Supernova dance festival near the Gaza border. At sentencing last Monday, November 11, the curator said he had not understood the full scale of the attacks at the time and apologized to anyone offended by the posts.
The ruling is the latest in a series of prosecutions over anti-Israel speech in Germany, where authorities have adopted an increasingly hard line over the past 13 months toward expressions of solidarity with Palestine and criticism of Zionism and Israel, which officials increasingly treat as antisemitism. Earlier this month, a Berlin court fined a 42-year-old Iranian citizen under the German Criminal Code for sharing the phrase “from the river to the sea” twice on Instagram in November and December 2023. In the cultural sphere, the crackdown on pro-Palestine speech has led to canceled exhibitions, talks, and programs, while artists and groups seen as supporting the Palestinian cause have been cast as aligned with terrorist organizations.
One example cited in the article involved state-funded Documenta, whose leadership issued a statement against Ruangrupa, the Indonesian collective that curated the exhibition’s most recent edition, after it “liked” social media videos of people chanting “Palestine will be free” at a demonstration on the day of Hamas’s attack. The curator’s conviction centered on three Instagram stories posted on October 8, 2023, as early reporting on the assault was beginning to reach international news outlets. The first included a historical illustration of Black soldiers hanging two White soldiers from nooses attached to palm trees, accompanied by a caption praising “revolutionary violence” and dismissing those unable to recognize its “beauty.”
The second story showed three images of Israeli ravers fleeing the Supernova festival, overlaid with the words “POETIC JUSTICE” in bold red text. The third combined two photographs: one of a young Israeli girl signing a missile bound for Lebanon during the Second Lebanon War in 2006, captioned “Remember this icon of settler innocence?” and another of a female Israeli raver running from the festival with the words “This is her now.”
According to German media outlet Die Welt, the accused and his attorney, Benjamin Düsberg, told the court that he did not know a massacre had taken place at the Supernova festival when he posted the stories. He said he later went to a nightclub after uploading them and deleted the posts immediately after learning the attack’s severity. “With the posts, I was reacting to Israeli partygoers who were dancing on the wall and thereby demonstrating their indifference to the plight of the Palestinian people,” the curator said in court.
Die Welt reported that its contributor, Boris Pofalla, viewed the curator’s Instagram stories and submitted the criminal complaint. Pofalla, whom the curator said he has never met, has also written about Ruangrupa and curator Bonaventure Ndikung, criticizing Ndikung’s position on the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, which calls for sanctions on Israel over its oppression of Palestinians. Pofalla had referenced the curator’s posts in a Die Welt feature published on October 11, 2023, alongside criticism of October 7 responses from Ruangrupa as well as Palestinian artists Emily Jacir and Jumana Manna.
The curator later told Hyperallergic that Berlin police did not inform him of a criminal investigation until April. “I’d only been based in Berlin for about a year when this ordeal began, and so it felt particularly surreal to find myself in the middle of such a revanchist and racially motivated media spectacle, just as the ongoing Israeli genocidal campaign against Palestinian life in Gaza was raging on,” he said. He added that he has struggled to cover rent and healthcare and has not booked a single curatorial opportunity since the Instagram posts were circulated in the media. Formerly employed at the Center for Contemporary Arts in Berlin, he most recently curated a solo exhibition by Brazilian artist Jota Mombaça as part of Berlin Art Week in 2023.
“I’m thankfully surrounded by loving friends and members of the community who’ve been immensely supportive, and honestly at this point in time it feels grotesque to want to ponder on one’s career when all that we’ve come to know and love is getting exterminated as we speak,” he said. Artists and cultural workers in Germany continue to grapple with the pressures of working with state institutions while the government restricts speech critical of Israel. This week, filmmaker Hito Steyerl, South African Jewish artist Candice Breitz, Forensic Architecture’s Eyal Weizman, and Turkish-German artist Raphael Malik withdrew from the upcoming “Art and Activism in Times of Polarization” symposium at the Neue Nationalgalerie after it was targeted in a social media post by the boycott advocacy group Strike Germany.
Editor’s Note, 7/27/2026, 2:55 EDT: The curator’s name has been removed from this report to protect their safety.
